"Gastroenterologists who X-rayed Lotito’s stomach said he was capable of consuming 2 pounds per day, according to his Guinness World Records entry."
I often read things and think about them and realize that it's so absurd I can't believe anyone tried to pass it off as true, and this is one of them.
Gastroenterologist: "Oh yeah, that stomach can consume metal, I know because..." Because what? You've been trained to identify stomachs that can digest metal using X-rays? What day of gastroenterologist school was that?
Go Google abdominal X-ray. You can't even tell where the stomach is, it's just a cloudy area.
"Oh yeah, that cloudy area there can definitely digest metal, I can tell just by looking at it. I'd say it can digest, say, a pound and a half easily. Probably two pounds. Probably not two and a half though, I can tell just by looking at it that two pounds would be too much. "
Iron toxicity from a patient that literally just took too many supplements.
You know how they say everybody has about a nail's worth of iron in their body?
It turns out that you definitely don't want a pound of it in your stomach.
Also turns out that a lot of other metals are the same kind of thing. Not gold though, it's generally not chemically active, so eat all the gold you want.
Now look at an x-ray of an abdomen with a metallic object in it. Seems pretty plausible thata person could look at an x-ray containing a bunch of metal and approximate how much of it there is.